Alex Katz has been called the “art-world David Lynch,” and indeed there’s something kind of supernatural about his life.

He had his first solo show in 1954 which is probably before your parents were born. Wait, let’s back up. Alex Katz is a living painter based in New York. LIVING. Not only alive, he paints seven days a week and still looks like a friendlier version of a middle-aged Picasso; except that he was born in the same year as the first transatlantic telephone call, 1927. Acquaintances say he takes daily baths in the fountain of youth, but actually he just swims two miles every morning.

Formidable as his health is, just being in the same room as a Matisse painting nearly made him faint. That is Katz’s dichotomy: street-forged tough, yet soft and sweet.

He’s a born and raised New Yorker. His art education was split between Manhattan’s Cooper Union and summers in rural Maine at Skowhegan (you know, summer the verb). He idolizes his Russian immigrant dad as a wild man who would jump off bridges, dress well, and race motorcycles. But Katz mostly inherited his dad’s coping mechanisms. “My father was very competitive with all males. And he passed me his insecurities. That’s part of it. You are not competitive unless you are insecure.” Of course, being old, most of his competitors are dead.

But he’s still competitive about how his wife stacks up against the muses of other artists, particularly Picasso’s famous model/over Dora Maar. “They both have great faces. But Ada has a much better neck and shoulders. Picasso faked them [in his paintings]…he cheated on the shoulders.” Simultaneously misogynistic and kind of cute...classic New Yorker. And he isn’t just sweet nothings, he’s painted Ada more than 200 times.

Katz’s insecurities about his art aren’t entirely unmerited, his work was described as having the substance of a “toothpaste ad.” Of course twenty years later Warhol was basically reprinting ads as art and being hailed for it, but Katz isn’t bitter; he knew what he wanted to paint. People told him he couldn’t paint from photographs, he said “You mean I can, but you can’t paint from photographs.” That DGAF attitude has delivered him from most of his insecurities about art. “My work is not expressionist, very little passion. And I don’t really care at this point.” So inspiring.